The Night Season (9 page)

CHAPTER

16

The drizzle was
relentless. It was the kind of rain that got in your eyes and streamed down your cheeks, so everyone always looked like they were crying. Archie had gone home and changed into corduroys. That was one of the things you learned living in Portland—avoid wet denim. The wicking action of the cotton carried the water upward so wet cuffs would bleed up to your knees. The denim leeched heat from your body like a cold bath. When they found missing people dead from hypothermia in the snow, and they were wearing jeans, they weren’t hikers. They were walkers. Tourists. Snow hikers didn’t wear jeans. They wore wool hats and thermal underwear and polypropylene.

It was two in the morning, and the crowd was still working on the seawall at Waterfront Park. The mild weather that had been causing the snowmelt had chilled, but only to the low forties, far above freezing. Gravity was pulling the runoff from every mountain stream straight down into the valley.

Archie was wearing brown leather shoes. He imagined his boots out in the river somewhere, floating next to the incongruous glut of crap that the flooding had knotted together: empty beer bottles, logs, lighters, condoms, plastic bottle caps, water jugs, and the occasional lost Croc. The leather shoes laced up to his ankles. Clarks. Debbie had told him once that they had gone out of style around 1980, but Archie had a soft spot for them.

The entire Japanese American Plaza was cordoned off with crime tape. Judging by the flashlight beams, there were fifty cops down there at least. Some of them knew Henry. Most probably didn’t. But that’s how it was. If one of your own was hurt, you showed up. Never mind that it was the middle of the night and a state of emergency had been declared. Fifty cops.
Too many
, Archie thought.

They all knew Archie. He tried not to think about that now. Gretchen Lowell had brought him more than his share of infamy. Within the ranks of the Portland Police Department, he was a ghost or a prophet. The ones who thought he was a phantom back from the dead avoided eye contact. The ones who thought he was some super cop, brimming with serial-killer know-how—they wouldn’t leave him alone. They thought he was smart and brave and lucky.

He was none of those things.

Not lucky, anyway. Certainly not that. Everyone around him suffered, one way or another.

Now Archie had to make up for that, had to find a way to save Henry. He couldn’t do it standing there alone in the rain.

Detective Jeff Heil trotted up. Archie recognized him from his stride. The sky was a thick frosting of clouds that blotted out the moon and stars and seemed to have its own vast unnatural glow. It wasn’t enough to see by. And even the buildings that lined the waterfront were dark—lights normally left on at night had been turned off, electrical box switches thrown to prevent short circuits.

Heil lifted his flashlight beam, illuminating his long face. His dark blond hair was so wet it looked painted on, and the shadows of the beam made his chiseled cheekbones look even more hollow than usual. Heil had joined Archie’s task force a year and a half ago, when Archie had come off his two-year post-Gretchen medical leave. Archie had been popping Vicodin all day long back then. Heil had to have known it. But as far as Archie knew, he’d never said anything.

“So?” Archie said, wiping rain from under his eyes.

Heil lowered the light. “We’ve searched it all,” he said. “There was nothing there. Bird shit. Mud.” He held something up. “And this.”

Archie swung his own flashlight up to see that Heil was holding a plastic evidence bag.

It was empty.

“Is it an invisible clue?” asked Archie.

“It’s a plastic bag,” Heil said. He caught himself. “I mean, inside the plastic bag.”

Heil focused his light on the bag, too, and gave it a little shake.

Archie took it and gave it a closer look. There was something plastic inside, almost exactly the same size as the evidence bag itself. From the looks of it, it was a plastic Ziploc freezer bag.

It looked clean. No drug residue. No crumbs from a sandwich. “Dog walker might have dropped it,” Archie said.

Portlanders were zealots about scooping up their dogs’ poop. The bags of choice were biodegradable store-bought ones designed for waste retrieval, or the blue plastic sleeves that
The New York Times
came in. Somewhere there was a landfill brimming with knotted blue plastic shit-filled
NYT
bags.

“Sure,” Heil said. “But I wanted to show you something, and it’s all we’ve got.”

An empty Ziploc bag. If that was a metaphor, they were screwed.

“Where’s the guy who had Henry’s phone?” Archie asked.

“Under the bridge.”

Heil led Archie up the promenade, shifting to get between the volunteers and guardsmen still hoisting sandbags into place in their race against time. Archie was grateful for the crowd. There were still local news teams around, and he didn’t want to get spotted. They would have been on him in an instant, cameras rolling, wanting details of the rescue.

By now the department would have gone public about the missing boy. The hospital security cameras had captured his grainy image leaving through an exit door, alone. It was a lousy shot—three-quarters profile, still in a hospital gown, barefoot, fleeing into the midnight rain. That was Archie to a tee—save someone and then immediately lose him. Classic.

It took looking at the photograph to make Archie realize how much the kid looked like his son.

He wondered if it was even a top story. Probably no one cared. Probably the news was all flood watch, all the time. The kid’s parents hadn’t even noticed he was gone, why would anyone else?

Archie could still feel the cold of the river in his bones.

“There,” Heil said.

They were under the Burnside Bridge. Archie felt himself exhale, suddenly lighter on his feet, and it took him a moment to realize it was the foreign sensation of being outside without being rained on. The concrete slab of bridge above them was supported by massive concrete pillars. This bridge had been built in the nineteenth century and then rebuilt in the 1920s. It wasn’t bad, with its Italian Renaissance towers and pretty metal railings. But that was up top. Down here it was dank and dirty. Much of the year, weekends brought Saturday Market booths, with their utensil mobiles and hemp necklaces. But in the winter there was no market, and the gap under the bridge became a shelter for homeless people trying to get out of the rain.

It was crowded down there now, but not with the homeless. National Guard trucks, volunteers handing out coffee, Parks and Recreation vehicles—it was a regular tailgate party. At the center of the action—dwarfing all but the largest National Guard vehicles—was the Portland PD’s massive new mobile command center. The only sign of the usual tenants was an abandoned shopping cart. Archie spotted two of his detectives, Mike Flannigan and Martin Ngyun, one on either side of the man who’d had Henry’s phone. Only he wasn’t wrapped in plastic anymore—he was cloaked in a gray wool blanket. There was a woman with them. She worked in social services. Archie wasn’t sure how he knew—something about how she stood, chest wide, feet apart, unintimidated by the ambient chaos.

The lights under the bridge were different than the construction lights illuminating the seawall project; these rotated, white and orange, so that everything shifted color at five-second intervals. The effect was part disaster zone, part nightclub.

Flannigan gave the woman a soft push forward. She gave him a dirty look.

“This is Mary Riley,” Flannigan said to Archie. “From the Mission.”

The Portland Rescue Mission ran a soup kitchen and shelter on Burnside, among other charitable activities. The soup kitchen fed so many that sometimes the line of homeless people out front would stretch for blocks along the sidewalk of the Burnside Bridge directly above them.

“I need to get back,” Riley said. Her brown hair was tucked up into a fleece cap and she was wearing a Columbia Sportswear jacket with a corduroy skirt and tights.

“She identified him for us,” Flannigan continued. “His name’s Dan Schmidt, but he goes by”—he lifted his fingers and made air quotes—“Otter. He’s schizophrenic. Off his meds. From what we can interpret, he found the phone on the path of the Japanese American Plaza. Picked it up. Didn’t see anything. He keeps mentioning this person Nick. Also, something about a spaceship and Ronald Reagan. We ran his prints. He’s in the system, but nothing violent.”

Archie could see how Dan Schmidt got his nickname. With his wet brown hair and bushy beard, wide flat nose and overbite, he did look like an otter.

“He’s harmless,” Riley said matter-of-factly. “Now can I get him out of the cold?”

Otter didn’t even look at them, eyes glued to a spot on the ground. Who knew what was in his rattled brain? With the right pills he might have a whole different story, might be able to describe exactly what had happened to Henry. But they couldn’t force meds on him, not without getting a court order, and they couldn’t prove he’d done anything wrong. There wasn’t a law against picking up a dropped cell phone. If he hadn’t picked it up, they never would have found Henry in time. He’d be dead.

“Who’s Nick?” Archie asked Otter.

Otter shuffled his feet. “River people,” he muttered. His eyes flicked up and looked out across the Willamette to the Eastbank Esplanade. It was a popular camping spot for the down-and-out.

“You know this guy Nick?” Archie asked Mary Riley.

“He’s kind of their leader,” Riley said. “Lives under the Hawthorne, I think. But I haven’t seen him all week.”

The street people who lived around the river were their own tribe. The city had long ago stopped fighting their presence. As long as they didn’t sell heroin to stroller moms or drink in public, they were left alone. Most of them stuck to the east side, where much of the esplanade was inaccessible to cars and there were plenty of places to hide.

If Otter couldn’t tell them anything about what had happened to Henry, maybe Nick could. It was a place to start.

“You’ve got room for him?” Archie asked Riley, with a nod at Otter. “If I need to find him later?”

“I’ll make room,” Riley said.

Archie glanced back at all the activity behind them, the trucks and equipment and people. The place stank with exhaustion and anxiety. All that work, and they were still at the mercy of the river’s whims.

Mary Riley handed him her card. “I’m taking him now, and getting some sleep. You can call me in the morning if you want to agitate him more.”

Archie was just tucking the card away when he heard his name. He could tell by the looks on his detectives’ faces that it was important. He turned to see Chief Eaton standing outside his command trailer, hailing Archie with an arm. Lorenzo Robbins stood next to him, towering over him a good foot.

There was good news and there was bad news, and Archie mostly dealt with the latter. He could recognize it at a distance—a reluctance around the mouth, a slope of the shoulders—and he could tell with one look that Lorenzo Robbins had bad news, and that the chief didn’t yet know what it was.

Archie hung his head and jogged over to them.

Chief Eaton was in full-dress rain gear, fancy cap and everything. But he got points for not being in bed. “You wanted him. There he is,” Eaton said to Robbins. “Now tell us what you’ve got.”

Robbins took a deep breath and looked at Archie. Somewhere under the bridge, the beeps of a backing truck sounded. “We’ve identified the toxin,” Robbins said. “But you’re not going to like it.”

CHAPTER

17

He saw the
picture of the boy on the news. He was alive. Wanted for questioning. The detective from the plaza was in critical condition. Poisoned, they said.

The other three were still listed as drowning victims. Flood-related tragedies. It happened. Eighteen people had died across the state since the flooding had begun. He had read about them all. Mudslides. Boating accidents. Cars swept off rural roads. The
Herald
always seemed to turn up breathless accounts from some witnesses or survivor. He had seen one story about an elderly man who had been swept away trying to rescue his wife after the creek surged on their farm. The neighbors saw him dive in after her. Heard her cry for him. Then she was gone. They said they could see his head above water for a while, looking at the spot where she had been. Maybe he was waiting for her to come up for air. But she never did. And then he went under, too. His three, they didn’t seem that special compared to that. To have a good story, you needed someone to tell it.

He thought about that as he prepared the tank.

It was only twenty gallons, small for an aquarium, but things got heavy quickly when you figured ten pounds for every gallon of water. He gently washed the rectangular tank out with warm water from the tap. Detergents and soaps were pollutants to such an otherwise pristine environment. He poured a blue aquarium gravel mix from the bag into a small clean bucket he had waiting on the bottom of the sink, and ran the tap over the gravel until the water ran clear. He rolled the pebbles under his fingertips. The blue was the color of the ocean from a travel postcard. It was why he had chosen such a pretty backdrop to Scotch-tape behind the glass—an image of a Greek island, white stucco houses and red roofs, alabaster cliffsides descending into that blue, blue water. He lowered the under-gravel filter plate into place at the bottom of the tank, and then carefully poured the clean gravel into the tank, making a bright azure floor three-quarters of an inch deep.

He positioned the filters and heater, and then lowered the tank into the sink under the faucet. He put a small plate on the bottom of the tank directly under the faucet stream, to keep the gravel from getting unsettled. And he turned the tap back on.

It took some time to fill the tank three-quarters full.

But he didn’t allow himself to get distracted. Instead he arranged his plants and decorations. Small plants in the front, taller in the back. He’d chosen a nice castle for this one, and a diving helmet and an arched bridge. When the water reached the three-quarters mark, he added these in, careful to press them securely into the gravel. He stepped back and admired the marine landscape.

Then he filled the tank to the top.

He unfolded the top of a small cardboard box and lifted the creature inside by the scruff of its neck.

The hamster had tiny black eyes and a quivering pink nose. Her belly was white, her head and back and ears apricot. Her little pink hands were clenched in panicked fists at her chest.

He dropped her into the tank and sealed the cover into place.

Wet, she looked like an entirely different animal. Tiny and slick, those pink feet uncurled, paws churning at the water. Her whiskers glanced against the surface, ears flat back, eyelids fluttering.

She would hold on for a while. They all did.

When she finally gave in, he’d let her rest for some time at the bottom of the tank, apricot fur feathering dreamily against the blue gravel.

And then he’d take apart the tank, wash it all, and start again.

He heard the back door open, and the rain get loud.

“There you are,” he said.

The boy streaked by behind him. His wet hospital gown clung to his scrawny knees.

The hamster swam and swam.

The man glanced up next to the window over the sink where he’d taped the column that Susan Ward had written, and wondered if she’d found what he’d left in her purse.